A civil rights fight that was thought to have been eradicated years ago is nevertheless taking place in the entertainment industry. So why is Hollywood still “painting down” stuntpeople?
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
It felt like 1964 all over again.
The news spread quickly earlier this month in the small, tight-knit stuntperson community. As first reported by Deadline, a white body double was going to be painted down — the process of literally painting someone with darker skin — to appear as a black woman to do work for a black female actor who was guest-starring in the Fox drama Gotham, instead of hiring a black stuntperson in the first place. It isn't always that news like this gets publicized. For the most part, Hollywood labor union SAG-AFTRA almost never hears about it, even though the union is convinced it happens more often than not. A SAG-AFTRA representative told BuzzFeed News that they hear about instances like this one two or three times a year now. It's their hope that this never happens again.
To a small group of people in this particular community, it was as if the revolutionary work done some 50 years ago in the fight for equal rights — and specifically in Hollywood — didn't happen. Phone calls were made, questions were asked, and immediately, Warner Bros. Television, which produces the show, released a statement saying it regretted the incident and was hiring a black woman to fulfill the position.
A source close to the production told BuzzFeed News that it was a below-the-line staffer who made the decision to paint down a stuntperson in order to match a female guest star, and that the studio and Gotham executive producers believe this practice is unacceptable, and that it will not happen again.
Jadie David, a trailblazing stuntperson and the person who made sure the dust rose on this one, is satisfied.
For now, anyway.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
When a 22-year-old David stepped onto her first Hollywood soundstage, she glanced around and took notice of what 1972 looked like.
Clearly, this was a moment. She was inspired. She would turn around and see someone else who looked like her. And she drank it in. The lead actors were black — as far as she could see, the fruits of the civil rights movement from five years earlier were at play here, and had unfolded in the microcosm on the set of Fred Williamson's star-making role.
The film was the Legend of Nigger Charley, the title jarring, to be sure. But the work — and the title in several cases — fell in line with what would later be coined blaxploitation films. This particular one was a Western and centered around a trio of escaped slaves who get fed up with the status quo, head out on their own, and dare a white man to threaten their newfound freedom; ultimately, this became one of Paramount's most successful films that year, and spurned two other sequels behind it.
Significantly, it was one of the first films that hired a black woman to do body-double work. That's why David was there. She was hired to do stuntwork for Denise Nicholas, a rising star in the blaxploitation era, who, like many actors of that era, was also an active voice during the civil rights movement.
"When I came into the business, it was charmed for me," David, now 64, told BuzzFeed News in a recent telephone interview. "You had these tall, black, strong action females, and there was no 5-foot-9-inch African-American women at the time [working as stuntpeople]. There was Pam Grier. There was Theresa Graves, There was Denise Nicholas. There were just a host of women I could double for, and so it was just...charmed."
It took a great deal to get here. This was the first time Hollywood produced films that catered to black audiences featuring strong, take-no-stuff themes. And it was the first time that American theatergoers saw black actors on screen portray something other than train porters, mammies, and shiftless field workers. Still, some critics considered films that came out of the genre to be exploitative, but they sure did make money.
"The genre flourished from 1971 through 1974. In today's dollars, I'd say the pictures — at best — brought in about $300 million," Josiah Howard, author of Blaxploitation Cinema: The Essential Reference Guide, said. "That would include the take from all the films up to 1980 — the action, horror, Westerns, dramas, comedies, and 'slice of life' pictures. There are about 200 blaxploitation pictures in all."
More than just the revenue aspect, these films gave black actors work. And that meant that people who worked behind the scenes should have seen a lift too. But it wasn't quite that simple.
Whether you loved them or were among those who were highly critical of the genre, blaxploitation films were themselves a small victory in terms of getting material featuring black actors produced in the first place. But the unexpected consequence was the pushback from studios to hire other black people to work behind the scenes.
"I soon realized that it wasn't charmed for everybody," David said, "and so I got involved in promoting job opportunities for people of color with another stuntman by the name of Marvin Walters. And when I got involved with that, that's when I realized that this isn't really that easy. Being a woman and being a person of color: Somebody's either keeping you from working because you're a woman — so they want to put a dress on a guy — or they're darkening somebody's skin, because they want to make a Caucasian person dark. So for every hurdle African-American men or men of color jump to get a job, every hurdle that a Caucasian woman jumped to get a job, women of color jumped two hurdles."
Shockingly, that hurdle-jumping continues to this day.
David, also a former business rep for Hollywood labor union SAG-AFTRA, was taken aback when discovering that her struggles in the industry may have been in vain. Earlier this month, she learned about the aforementioned paint-down incident on Gotham.
The white stuntperson — who remains unnamed — initially secured for the Gotham role was contracted to perform stunts for black guest actor Lesley-Ann Brandt, who earlier this year appeared in a guest role on the VH1 series Single Ladies and is perhaps best known for her role as Naevia on Starz's Spartacus: Gods of the Arena. (Just who Brandt is playing on Gotham is unclear, though she has been posting on Twitter and Instagram about her participation on the show.) BuzzFeed News reached out to Brandt for comment, and emails and phone calls to her representatives were not returned.
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